


Cyclical

by ConstanceComment



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Mild Gore, Multi, POV Second Person, Past Child Abuse, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 00:06:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6493189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Tarvek dreams.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cyclical

**Author's Note:**

> See the end notes for content warnings.

It takes two and a half years. It takes just long enough for you to die. It takes long enough that he comes and saves you. It takes from the span of one breath inhaled to the moment when you scream it out.

* * *

You want to know what stupid is? Stupid is loving two people who are going to get you killed. They reached into your chest and moved the valves of your heart with their own hands, their own breath rising and falling in your serpent’s lungs. They don’t own you, now, because you’re smarter than that. Because you’re not someone who can be _owned,_ just _borrowed_ for a little while. Folded neatly into something they can use and fight with, the way a pistol forms around a firing pin. Or a good knife in someone’s palm, before it ends in someone else’s ribs.

Stupid is your cousin’s knife in your own useless heart. Stupid is knowing he’s done you a favor, in his own way. Your heart has never been good for you. You’re smart enough not to make decisions with it, but it still sits there, beating in your chest, _aching_. Or at least, it did. Beat, that is.

Your heart aches all the time, now. You’re still holding onto that breath.

* * *

You’re eight years old, and you’re going home for the first time in a long time, to a place that does not love you. The passenger blimp is cold. It’s quiet. You can hear the engines, but can’t feel it, just the swaying of the air beneath you.

You didn’t used to be afraid of falling. But there is so much open air, and you have such a long way to go.

You don’t stop falling for the next thirteen years.

 _A rolling death_ , they say.

* * *

You don’t take your shirt off in public. Or private. Or anywhere you think anyone could see. Bad enough Agatha saw it, all the scars that litter your body, from your collarbones to your wrists. Life did a number on you, and neither life nor its aftermath are pretty.

You escape from the hospital in a bedsheet. You don’t get clothes until they’ve started to kill you, and yes, they’re killing you, yes, they’re saving your life. But you’re getting so tired of how often those two things overlap.

Everything has a price, and it’s always blood, blood, blood.

* * *

Gil pushes you out of an airlock handcuffed to Othar Tryggvassen and one of his own infernal falling machines.

You’ve had nightmares that go almost exactly like this.

* * *

Your tutors teach you to sing, and your mother inspects your progress. Can the boy hold a note? In how many languages? Can he recite politics, theory, history, math? Can he hold a blade right, can he defend himself, can he stay alive?

Those last questions had nothing to do with your singing voice, except for purpose of each, the real question underneath: can the boy perform? Or should we just start over?

You find the same question in Gil’s head, when Agatha throws his _everything_ into yours. Can the boy perform? Or should—

* * *

_We could’ve kept him safe_ , you tell her, spark dying in your throat.

Agatha doesn’t call you on the lie. You can barely protect yourselves.

 _They won’t keep him_ , she says, and you don’t call her lie, either.

* * *

You’re twenty-one winters into life, and a girl walks into your father’s castle.

You meet her on the steps. She is so beautiful, and you are so fucked.

Not that you know that last part, yet. At this second, you’re twenty-one and just vaguely sorry, at the waste and the loss of it all. You look forward, almost, to the end.

You kiss her hand.

* * *

Graduation for a smoke knight means a summary wasping. Most things, in your family, mean a summary wasping. Your mother sold the throne to put you on it; all the better to rule through you, you think, if your sister hadn’t killed her.

 _Unfortunate statistical extremes_ is the phrase you pick. What happened to a sizeable percentage of the Gap’s population is a better one. What happened to your distant cousins, to their staff, to their bodyguards. To your bodyguards.

You send Violetta to Mechanicsburg. It’s easy enough to be cruel one more time.

* * *

When your sister dies, she dies three times: when your father kills her. When the puppet kills her. When _you—_

You’re still holding that breath.

* * *

Some of the scars are worse than others. There are the acid burns, the electrical damage. The places where skin turned black or puckered or flaked, or you just generally fell apart.

There’s the ones on your back and your sides where a pirate cut you very carefully to pieces, and asked if, from feel alone, you could see the design. And the pain-drunk answer you gave was _yes_ , you could, in the wet-warm blood and the cold, electric feel of a knife through your nerves, carving deep as she pleased. You knew madness when you saw it. Sometimes, when it’s cold enough, you know that madness again, damaged nerves misfiring all along your back and sides as your tattered skin misreads simple sensory inputs.

There’s the scar on your neck from a garrote wire that was mostly sharp, but not enough to kill you. A bodyguard you’d known since you were thirteen gave it to you, and you nearly kept the wire, after, out of some bizarre egomania.

You wear high collars for a reason, not just because they’re fashionable, or because it’s cold where you live. You started reinforcing the damn things, after that. You sewed the sheeting in yourself, and made the metal, too.

* * *

_What’s it like, having a family?_ Gil asks you.

 _What’s it like not having one?_ You ask him back.

You’re seven years old. You’re more than vaguely aware that this isn’t how the world is supposed to be, but only because he told you.

* * *

When the lightning strikes, you don’t even feel it.

When you die—

* * *

_The Baron’s son will kill you if you try to harm her,_ you tell your cousin, quiet and simple as you please. _But only if **I don’t do it first.**_

* * *

You’re nine years old, and you’re watching Violetta stand on one hand. She can do it for hours; she’s very proud of herself.

She tells you to watch.

You tell her that her form needs work.

* * *

There’s a light in the sky, coming in fast.

* * *

One of your Parisian uncles was always fascinated by time. He liked clocks, and no one bothered him because he was harmless, because he was fringe to the family and he liked _clocks,_ of all things. He said that time was a cube, and a line, and a circle. More dimension had the world, claimed he, than mortal science yet understood.

You’d asked him about the Storm King’s lantern, and he’d laughed, and ruffled your hair. He said you had an ear for stories. But that one, most likely, was not true.

When you go home, after Wulfenbach, you take a little of his advice to heart. Just not, you think, the advice he would’ve wanted you to hold on to.

It’s very easy to play being stupid. Harder to walk the line between useless and not, to be insignificant enough that no one _really_ tries to have you killed as a rival, but not so much of a waste that they don’t scrap you for Tweedle.

You’re eight years old, and you make a plan. You don’t need to trust anyone, and no one needs to trust you. All that needs to happen, is they have to count on you being alive, and empowered. Self-interest, you think, is so much easier than trust.

* * *

You ask Tinka, very politely, if you can examine her. Superficially, you swear, nothing invasive, you won’t even touch. You ask her to move her joints and her wrists and all the rotations of her body.

You ask her to dance because it’s what she was made for. You ask her to dance, because she wants to know if you’d like to see. It’s beautiful.

She asks you to waltz, and your shaking limbs barely carry you through it. You’ll remember this moment for the rest of your life.

She says you’re the one she was made for. It’s been a very long week, since your sister died. You have to try very hard not to cry.

* * *

Stupid is expecting to survive. Not dying is work.

There’s a knife in your chest, in your heart, specifically, and a little bit of your left lung.

You take a breath—

* * *

You’re pretty sure, by the time you hit the ground, that home is supposed to be somewhere you can live. And you can live with yourself, and you can stay alive, but those are talents forged largely from repression, and the sheer will _not to die._

There are things worth dying for, Violetta would’ve said. Not that you’d ever ask her; you wouldn’t— 

You’re seventeen years old, and she graduates tomorrow. You’ll be going to Paris. You might as well both be free.

* * *

_Get up loser, you’ve had worse!_

* * *

Gil asks you if you want to steal an emergency glider. He’s pretty sure you both can fit; he’s done this _loads_ of times, he swears.

He holds his hand out.

You take it.

He jumps.

You’ve known him for eight months. Later, you’ll have nightmares that go almost exactly like this.

* * *

There’s a pirate on Gil’s ship. You were pretty sure the Empire _shot_ pirates, but DuPree’s continued existence makes you doubt that, not to mention the possibility of a just and loving god. Not that you’ve believed in a long time; if justice were a mandated fact, you’d have never survived this long, and your whole bloodline would be a smoking hole in the earth.

She asks about your scars.

You ask Gil why he hasn’t had her killed.

It occurs to you, this late in the game, that that’s the exact question you’ve always tried to provide an answer to in reference to yourself. Being useful, is, as always, a large component of being used.

* * *

If Agatha hates you, you’re pretty sure you could live with that. It would be awful, but not any worse than any of the other poisons you’ve swallowed. You want her to be happy.

It turns out that she wants you to live.

* * *

You take a breath.

You let it out.

And then, you scream.

* * *

When you wake, you scars are gone. You feel every single one leave your body, all at once, a lifetime’s worth of nonlethal pain.

 _A rolling death_ , they said.

You come back to the land of the living. It hurts just as badly the second time.

You take a breath. And another. And another. And—

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings include: Child abuse - Tarvek's family is horrible as always, from emotional abuse to physical, and Gil's relationship with his dad is alluded to; Gore - DuPree and the story of how Tarvek got those beautiful scars, plus a bit of description of how he got a bunch of other scars as well; Temporary major character death - exactly as per canon. 
> 
> I have a lot of feelings about Tarvek losing his scars. I think it's a shame to have had them expunged in canon, but I really doubt that he'd agree with me, vain as he is. And not everyone is of the opinion that scars are a testament to what you survived; sometimes, they're just really ugly reminders.


End file.
